1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to universal communication with peripheral devices, and more particularly to communication with a plurality of peripheral devices using a common communications protocol on a common communications channel.
2. Description of Related Art
There are various manufacturers of peripheral devices including printers, bar code readers, and scanners, for example. Each manufacturer and peripheral employs its own communications protocol to enable a control device such as a computer to communicate with the peripheral.
In a computer system, the problem of different communications protocols for different peripheral devices is solved by employing drivers specifically designed to interface a computer bus to a peripheral device to enable communication therebetween. However, this problem is compounded with the proliferation of distributed systems in which printers, for example, may be controlled by one or more widely distributed computers on a local area network. In such distributed systems, for each computer to have access to each printer, each computer must have the required drivers for each printer.
Printers are usually connected to a local area network by an adapter card which resides in a computer. The adapter card communicates with a parallel port of the computer to control the printer with codes specific to that printer. Such codes are sent over the network from an originating computer, which may be any computer configured with a suitable driver to produce the necessary control codes to control the printer. Thus, the originating computer produces the codes required by the printer to control the printer and sends such codes over the network to the adapter card. Consequently, each originating computer must have an appropriate driver to produce the necessary codes to control the printer. This requires that each originating computer have knowledge of each available printer. This can be daunting to maintain. What would be desirable therefore, is a universal system for communication with peripheral devices.